{"id":24361,"date":"2011-03-20T03:22:19","date_gmt":"2011-03-20T07:22:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/24361\/confessions-sub-prime-mortgage-lender\/"},"modified":"2011-03-20T03:22:19","modified_gmt":"2011-03-20T07:22:19","slug":"confessions-sub-prime-mortgage-lender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/24361\/confessions-sub-prime-mortgage-lender\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a Sub-Prime Mortgage Lender"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t a long part of my professional career. It was only a couple of years. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I remember the questionnaire I had to fill out when I applied for the job at Countrywide Home Loan\u2019s Full Spectrum Lending Division:\u00a0 How do you feel about sub-prime lending?\u00a0 At the time in 2006, I didn\u2019t even know what sub-prime lending even was, much less what I felt about it. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I got hired, and a year and a bit later, I was done with sub-prime lending just as sub-prime lending was going away as a financial industry.\u00a0 It was four years ago tonight <\/strong>that I posted the video below, where I first complained that seemingly overnight, my challenges at work went from people saying \u201cno\u201d to me to me having to say \u201cno\u201d to people.\u00a0 Lending guidelines had tightened up tremendously.\u00a0\u00a0 I could no longer give loans to pretty much anyone.\u00a0 I didn’t lose my job; my job just sorta went away. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/object><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A couple months later, I barely managed to put together a California-sized $600,000 loan for a customer who was struggling to make his payments as it was.\u00a0 My new loan for him didn\u2019t reduce his payments at all, as he had hoped when he had the bought the home two years prior.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t lock him into a fixed rate for the long term.\u00a0 All it did would was buy him another couple years of a barely-manageable sub-prime rate somewhere in the 8% range.\u00a0 It was the best he could do, and I was with one of the only lenders that would give it to him.\u00a0 The cost of this deal was $20,000 of his small equity.\u00a0 I told him he really had no other options as he complained about this deal.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, I have another option.<\/strong>\u201d<\/span> he retorted.\u00a0 \u201cI could put a gun in my mouth!\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"I think that phone call, more than any other thing, lead me to quit the sub-prime mortgage business.\u00a0 Now, as I start a new career as a drug and alcohol dependency counselor, I have the training I need to handle a suicide threat like that.\u00a0 Back then, I did not. I was a salesman, not a suicide counselor.\u00a0 At the time, I was just starting to reconnect with my true self and was discovering that the financial services world wasn\u2019t for me.\u00a0 A few weeks after I quit my job, Countrywide shut down the office where I was working .\u00a0 I saw the handwriting on the wall.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Let me just say this about the small part of the sub-prime mortgage business that I witnessed first hand:\u00a0 we bought into the same delusion that the country did.\u00a0 We thought we were doing good by helping people with bad credit get loans to buy or refinance homes.\u00a0 It was almost a noble pursuit. When we did well, we got paid a lot of money, but there were months where I made no money at all.\u00a0 Can you imagine what it does to a family\u2019s finances to find out you are not going to get paid for a month\u2019s work?\u00a0 Amongst many other factors, that was part of what lead to my divorce, the end of a 9 year relationship.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

At the time, the idea that property values would actually decline was inconceivable to us.\u00a0 We were putting people in loans under the assumption (although we never overtly promised people this would happen) that in a couple years, home values would increase, their loan-to-value ratio would decrease, their credit would get better, and they\u2019d be able to refinance again into a more favorable \u201cprime\u201d loan.\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 None of that ended up happening.\u00a0 That\u2019s why there were so many foreclosures, bringing down the values of everyone\u2019s homes, and here we are today in the midst of a mega recession.\u00a0 For which, I am partly responsible.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

We didn\u2019t mean it!\u00a0 We honestly believed home values would continue to increase! Even in California!<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

A week or so after I made the confessional video above, I followed up on what someone had suggested, namely that I should take my guitar out (this was in me pre-ukulele days) and go out busking.\u00a0 Beg people for money\u2026 That is what I did. One of my favorite videos that “happened” in my ongoing hobby…\u00a0 In my sub-prime lender blues style\u2026<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It wasn\u2019t a long part of my professional career. It was only a couple of years. I remember the questionnaire I had to fill out when I applied for the job at Countrywide Home Loan\u2019s Full Spectrum Lending Division:\u00a0 How do you feel about sub-prime lending?\u00a0 At the time in 2006, I didn\u2019t even know […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,10,8],"tags":[2690,81,2691],"class_list":["post-24361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-life","category-music","tag-banking","tag-joko","tag-subprime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}